Eavan Boland was an Irish poet who taught at Stanford University. Her poetry focuses on Irish life and often takes a feminist perspective on various social issues. She won the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Her first book was published in 1967. It was followed by The War Horse, In Her Own Image, and Night Feed.
‘Ode to Suburbia’ by Eavan Boland is a cleverly written poem that explores suburbia and its out-of-sight power. The poem suggests that suburbia has drained those who live there of their potential.
Six o'clock: the kitchen bulbs which blister
Your dark, your housewives starting to nose
Out each other's day, the claustrophobia
Of your back gardens varicose
‘Anorexic’ by Eavan Boland presents a woman determined to destroy her physical body through starvation while alluding to the original sin.
Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.
‘The Singers’ by Eavan Boland is a unique poem that discusses the act of finding joy and expression in the midst of adversity.
The women who were singers in the West
lived on an unforgiving coast.
I want to ask was there ever one
moment when all of it relented--
‘The Famine Road’ weaves Irish famine horrors with a tale of infertility, revealing deep scars of imperialism and personal loss.
Barren, never to know the load
of his child in you, what is your body
now if not a famine road?
‘Amethyst Beads’ by Eavan Boland alludes to Greek mythology and the suffering of a child, Persephone, after she was separated from her mother, Demeter.
A child crying out in her sleep
Wait for me. Don’t leave me here.
Who will never remember this.
Who will never remember this.
‘And Soul’ by Eavan Boland is a poem about death and a body’s dissolution into the elements it is made up of.
My mother died one summer—
the wettest in the records of the state.
Crops rotted in the west.
Checked tablecloths dissolved in back gardens.
Boland’s ‘Child of Our Time’ reflects on a tragic loss, advocating for societal change through a poignant tribute to a young victim.
Yesterday I knew no lullaby
But you have taught me overnight to order
‘Cityscape’ by Eavan Boland is a complex, allusion-filled poem that describes Dublin and the Blackrock Baths, and presents contrasting images of past and present.
I have a word for it —
the way the surface waited all day
to be a silvery pause between sky and city —
which is elver.
‘How We Made a New Art on Old Ground’ by Eavan Boland depicts the way that poetry can remake a landscape with dark history, if only for a few moments as one reads it.
A famous battle happened in this valley.
You never understood the nature poem.
Till now. Till this moment—if these statements
seem separate, unrelated, follow this
‘Is it Still the Same’ is a brilliant, affirming poem that explores memory and its relationship to a particular place and time.
young woman who climbs the stairs,
who closes a child's door,
who goes to her table
in a room at the back of a house?
‘Love’ was published in Eavan Boland’s 1994 collection In a Time of Violence. It speaks on themes of love, regret, and memory.
Dark falls on this mid-western town
where we once lived when myths collided.
Dusk has hidden the bridge in the river
which slides and deepens
‘Outside History’ intertwines the cosmic and the personal, reflecting on the unseen lives of women against the backdrop of Irish history.
These are outsiders, always. These stars—
these iron inklings of an Irish January,
whose light happened
Eavan Boland’s poem ‘Quarantine’ is a non-traditional love poem about a husband and wife who are forced to move north during the Great Irish Famine in 1847. RTÉ shortlisted 10 poems as Ireland’s favorite poems of the last century in 2015. Boland’s ‘Quarantine’ was one of them.
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.
Boland’s ‘That the Science of Cartography is Limit’ reveals maps’ inability to capture the suffering behind Ireland’s famine roads.
--and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragments of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.
‘The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me’ is a poignant tale around an heirloom, linking generations through themes of love and memory.
It was the first gift he ever gave her,
buying it for five francs in the Galeries
in pre-war Paris. It was stifling.
A starless drought made the nights stormy.
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